Significant advances have been made in recent years in developing CCD or CMOS type solid-state imaging devices in which a large number of photodiodes (PDs) are integrated on the surface of a semiconductor substrate, with a color filter of red (R), green (G), or blue (B) stacked on each PD. Current digital cameras are equipped with such solid-state imaging devices having several millions of PDs integrated on a single chip.
The above-mentioned solid-state imaging device, configured to use the color filters, suffers from low optical efficiency, false color generation, and the like. Therefore, as a solid-state imaging device without these disadvantages, there has been proposed a stacked solid-state imaging device, for example, described in JP-A-2002-83946. This stacked solid-state imaging device is configured such that three photoelectric conversion layers are stacked above a semiconductor substrate for detecting red (R), green (G), and blue (B) color lights, and signal charges generated in the films are accumulated in accumulation diodes formed on the semiconductor substrate, then the signal charges accumulated in the accumulation diodes are read out and transferred by a signal readout circuit such as vertical and horizontal CCDs formed on the surface of the semiconductor substrate. This stacked solid-state imaging device can eliminate the above disadvantages and produce high quality images.
In the stacked solid-state imaging device described in JP-A-2002-83946, it is required to read out the R signal in the first frame, the G signal in the second frame, and the B signal in the third frame, and to use the R, G, and B signal readouts at the end of the third frame to produce one color image data. This time-intensive process for producing color image data makes it difficult to achieve video acquisition, high-speed continuous shooting, and the like.